Clearing the Decks: Acting FBI Director Resigns Hours After Assuming Role

If anyone wanted a glimpse of the incompetence and chaos in the previous administration, the FBI’s top leadership just put on a master class over the last few days.

Last month, Christopher Wray made his intention public to resign as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Donald Trump had already announced Kash Patel as his replacement, which meant that Trump would fire Wray at the first opportunity. (Trump had repeatedly pledged to do just that.) Wray planned to resign on Sunday and leave his deputy director Paul Abbate to assume the role of Acting Director, presumably to ensure continuity until a new FBI Director could win Senate confirmation. 

Did Wray even bother to check with Abbate? It sure doesn’t look like it, because Abbate quit almost as soon as he took the reins at the FBI:

FBI’s longtime deputy director, who had been expected to temporarily replace director Christopher Wray on an acting basis during the transition into the new Trump administration, says he is retiring. Paul Abbate made the unexpected announcement in an email to senior officials Monday ahead of President Trump’s inauguration, CBS News confirmed.

“When the Director asked me to stay on past my mandatory date for a brief time, I did so to help ensure continuity and the best transition for the FBI. Now, with new leadership inbound, after nearly four years in the deputy role, I am departing the FBI today,” Abbate wrote in the letter, according to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the email.

Abbate had been running the FBI for only one day after Wray stepped down as director on Sunday. Wray was named by Trump during his first term and had been director for more than seven years. He announced his retirement when Trump said he wanted Kash Patel to be the director.

There’s only one way to describe this: clown show. Wray had six weeks to make these arrangements from the time he decided to resign until Sunday. Did he and Abbate ever coordinate on it at all? If Abbate didn’t want the role, Wray should have found another FBI exec to name as Acting Director, if need be by having Abbate retire first to allow the next in line to move up.

No matter, though. Trump’s transition team quickly replaced Wray and Abbate with two other well-respected FBI leaders in the field as Patel awaits a confirmation hearing in the Senate:

Brian Driscoll, who was recently named the special agent in charge of the Newark field office, will be acting director, according to a statement on the White House’s website. Robert Kissane, the top counterterrorism agent in New York, will serve as the acting deputy director. Both men are well-respected inside the F.B.I.

In an email to F.B.I. employees, Mr. Driscoll said the acting attorney general had asked Mr. Kissane to fill the deputy role. Mr. Driscoll said he looked forward to working with Mr. Kissane over the “course of the transition to ensure the F.B.I.’s critical mission to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution continues.”

The decision to elevate Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane to the seventh floor of bureau headquarters where senior leadership sits signals that the Trump administration wanted a clean break after lengthy F.B.I. investigations that ensnared the president.

Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., had written that the president needed to “fire the top ranks of the F.B.I.”

Well, Patel can scratch that off the to-do list! Wray and Abbate abandoned ship before Trump had to lift a finger to remove the FBI’s “top ranks.” Assuming Patel gets confirmed, he and Trump can fill those roles with professionals rather than wanna-be politicians. And perhaps that alone will improve the strategic thinking — or at least the succession planning — at the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.

So when will Kash Patel face off against the Senate Judiciary Committee? That hearing has not yet been scheduled, likely because Pam Bondi has not yet been confirmed as Attorney General, a superior officer to the FBI Director. Bondi should get a Senate confirmation referral from Judiciary in the next day or two; the only question is whether some Democrats vote for her. If Bondi can get confirmed by the end of the week, Judiciary can take up Patel fairly soon thereafter, assuming all of his paperwork is in order. 

With Abbate and Wray out of the way, though, perhaps it’s not as time-critical as before. It appears that the FBI is cleaning house already.